A true mother’s touch: In 15-hour surgery, mom’s bone graft saves her just-born son’s spine, which was damaged at birth

THE DIAGNOSIS THAT POSED A CHALLENGE TO SURGEONS

Once the spine MRI confirmed their worst fears, the parents rushed to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi. With the baby being just four months old, even doctors at the country’s premier institute were at a loss about what to do. That’s when Dr Deepak Gupta from the Department of Neurosurgery at AIIMS Trauma Centre took to medical journals and spoke to experts from around the world. “Usually for a spine injury such as this, we would use a titanium implant to stabilise it and keep it in place. However, these implants can be used only in children three years and above. Onu was too small for implants,” he tells us.

These kinds of spine injuries are rare. “The parents told us that the baby’s birth weight was 4.3 kg. When the baby is big, doctors should perform a C-section instead of a normal delivery. Otherwise, it results in injury to the mother and the child,” explains Dr Gupta. And one of the main reasons for overweight foetuses these days is gestational diabetes, which Onu’s mother Shaloo had a history of. Says Kumar, “Our first-born, who is now three, was also bigger – her birth weight was 3.7 kg because my wife had diabetes while she was pregnant. She had to be kept on oxygen too for a couple of days after birth. We mentioned this to the doctors at the hospital back in Meerut. Had they done a C-section, we could’ve brought a healthy baby home.”

Dr Gupta looked up cases of similar spine fractures in babies and found one in the US. “The baby had fallen from the mother’s lap and sustained the injury. However, it wasn’t as severe as Onu’s, so the doctors could take the baby’s rib bone to repair the damage,” he says. In Onu’s case, he explains, such a repair was not possible because the damage was too extensive, and babies mostly have cartilaginous bones that cannot be used for such a repair. That’s when it hit him, he could use the mother’s bone.

WHY SURGERY WAS THE ONLY OPTION FOR FOUR-MONTH-OLD

“If the injury wasn’t severe, we would have waited for the baby to grow up. But Onu was already in respiratory distress, and we had to operate. So, we decided to take a bone from the mother’s hip and place it as a support on the part of the damaged spine to stabilise it,” says Dr Gupta. Instead of operating from behind the neck, the doctors had to open Onu up from the front because one of the damaged bone fragments was jutting inside the spinal column. This made the surgery, along with putting the child on anaesthesia, more challenging.

The surgery lasted for 15 hours, of which doctors took seven hours to deliver the anaesthesia to Onu. At the same time, the mother underwent a 45-minute surgery in an OT next door to remove a part of her hip bone.  Other than Dr Gupta, the team of doctors treating Onu included Dr GP Singh from neuroanaesthesia, Dr Akshay Jaryal from neurophysiology, Dr Sheffali Gulati, Dr Rakesh Lodha and Dr Jhuma Shankar from the department of paediatrics, and Dr Subodh Garg from general Surgery.

FINALLY, ONU IS HOME

Onu stayed in the hospital’s ICU for eleven months before being discharged earlier this month. “He has finally come home,” says Kumar. But this reunion has been bittersweet. While Kumar is happy that he will now get to do the naming ceremony that kept being pushed because of his condition, he would also have to wait and see Onu’s limb functionality. “Onu was just a name we thought of on the spot because we had to put something down on the hospital papers. We would like to give him a proper name now,” he says.

Onu is slowly getting used to the quiet of the house from the hustle bustle of the ICUs. “The other day, when we took him back to AIIMS for a routine check-up, he was very happy to see his doctors and nurses. They celebrated his first birthday with us, they are a part of our family now,” says Kumar.